I am doing my first project in Kicad and so far it is going well. I have multiple tiny boards done in sheets in the schematic and I have manually done all the mouse bites and layout in PCB editor. It looks great in the 3D viewer but I am missing a step or a trick somewhere.
The problem I have is that 1 of the boards needs to be duplicated 3 times. I have 1 copy laid out as I want it and 2 empty 22mm x 19mm spaces ready for the others. When I copy and paste the components from the first one it also copies the wiring so all the traces interconnect. Is there a way to stop it doing this or do I need to draw it 3 times in the schematic and manually lay it out 3 times?
Doing it manually won’t be a big problem on tiny & simple boards but on more complex ones it will become a headache. Thanks all.
In KiCad, the only officially supported workflow (at the moment) is one PCB for one project. You are mentioning “multiple tiny boards” and “mouse bites” and you’re presumably making some sort of combined panel. Though this is not officially supported, there are plugins such as KiKit that can help with this.
For your three instances of the same circuit, you can work with a hierarchical sheet, and then include that sheet three times in your project. Upto KiCad V8 this worked quite nicely in combination with the Replicate Layout plugin. In KiCad V9 this plugin is no longer needed and it’s functionality has been integrated into KiCad itself with PCB Editor / Tools / Multi Channel / … There is a short demo video for Multi-Channel on the KiCad V9.0.0 release notes website: